Reflections on Revised Common Lectionary readings for each week. Feel free to comment & join in a conversation!

Friday, 12 August 2016

Judging what is right:

Hebrews
11: 29-12:2 Luke 12: 49-56

What a strange few weeks it has been in the news: atrocities in Belgium, Nice, now Thailand – and yet also the positive news of the Olympics and its stories for human friendship and peaceful competition and joyful endeavour.Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, has said this about the human condition in his book “Between the Monster and the Saint”:“It is a harsh world, indescribably cruel.It is a gentle world, unbelievably beautiful.It is a world that can make us bitter, hateful, rabid, destroyers of joy.It is a world that can draw forth tenderness from us, as we lean towards one another over broken gates.It is a world of monsters and saints, a mutilated world, but it is the only one we have been given. We should let it shock us not into hatred or anxiety, but into unconditional love.”

So how can what Jesus says to his disciples in
Luke’s gospel help us as we try to respond lovingly to the world and its news?

Jesus speaks
of “this fateful hour”. “You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth
and sky but you cannot interpret this
fateful hour”.

Jesus is on
his way to Jerusalem – He ‘sets his face resolutely towards Jerusalem’ in Luke
chapter 9 v 51 and continues on this journey until this final ascent into the
city in chapter 19 v 28. Everything that happens in chapters 10 to 18 – and
that’s more than a third of Luke’s gospel – happens in the shadow of Jesus’ forthcoming
death in Jerusalem.

Jesus knows,
and he wants his disciples to know, that the time is coming when he will
confront sin, evil and death head on – and he will triumph, but not without
suffering.

Everything
else that happens pales into insignificance next to the sacrifice of Jesus in
the cause of God’s kingdom of love, forgiveness and justice.

Jesus is
acknowledged as a wise teacher, and so people have come to him with questions
and issues and disputes and have asked Jesus what to do.

Martha has
come to Jesus, complaining about Mary; the lawyer asks what he has to do to
gain eternal life; the disciples wish to learn how to pray; others are asking
questions about cleanliness; and then there is the approach from the man asking
Jesus to tell his brother to divide the fairly property fairly.

In response to
all this, Jesus wants to point his listeners towards what is really important –
the things of God. Do not worry.. but seek first the kingdom.

There is a
time of great decision coming in the lives of Jesus’ disciples – he warns them
that he will go through a ‘baptism’ of suffering, and that it will bring
division and difficulty. In the end, Jesus is so much more than a wise teacher,
he is God with us, is prepared to go to the farthest end to demonstrate God’s
love for us – for the whole world.

So what difference
does this make to those of us who describe ourselves as followers of the Jesus?
And what does this mean for us as we talk and think about the role of this
church in this place, and as you seek new leadership? How can we be people who
make a difference to the world in the name of Christ Jesus?

I think one
thing that is not an option is for
us to follow Jesus in a half-hearted or part-time way.

I remember a
few years ago filling in some sort of questionnaire & under ‘leisure
activities”, along with walking and painting and going to the theatre, it
listed “religious adherence”. I was appalled – to think that my discipleship of
Jesus Christ could be reduced to a “leisure activity” – as if it was just how I
choose to fill my Sunday mornings if the car’s already washed and there’s
nothing on the television. Surely following Jesus should shape all of our
lives, all of our choices, how we view other people as well as how we treat
them.

This church
is not just somewhere to come to fill in an hour or so on Sunday – it is a
place to be fed and nurtured in your faith: a place of challenge as well as a
place of comfort.

Faith
itself, as the letter to the Hebrews points out, is the core of our being as
people of God. Many have gone before us our ancestors in faith – Abraham and
Sarah, Isaac, Moses, and others – and these form a ‘great cloud of witnesses’
around us as we run our own race of life.

Running that
race, we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus – remembering that he is the one who
“endured the cross, ignoring its disgrace, and has taken his seat at the right
hand of the throne of God”. Jesus is the one who shows us how to respond to
what is monstrous in our world.

When life is
difficult, painful, and puzzling, there will always be people who ask us how we
can believe in God, how we can remain people of faith, when the world is so
full of pain. Jesus shows us that the pain is not the sign that God is absent,
but that he has endured pain and death in order to overcome it. We believe in a
God who is present in the pain, and endures pain, and transforms pain into
victory.

So in a
world of violence we look to Jesus as our hope

In a world
of conflict we look to Jesus as our peace

In a world
of fear we look to Jesus as our joy.

And we
dedicate ourselves to work and pray for God’s kingdom to come and for the love
of God to reach all people in our mixed-up and broken world.

May this church, and each of our lives, be a place where God's love and God's challenge is known and heard.

About Me

Presently I am Moderator of the South Western Synod of the United Reformed Church, which means on any given Sunday I can be preaching in a URC from Portscatho & Falmouth in the South & West to Highworth & Swindon in the North & East. From October 2007 to June 2013 I was 'Priest-in-charge' of the Local Ecumenical Partnership of Whittlesford & Pampisford - consisting of 2 Parish Churches & one United Reformed Church (in Whittlesford) plus minister to Duxford URC: that's when I began this blog.